Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday April 14, 2015 @03:35PM
from the classiest-thing-you'll-read-about-the-TSA-all-week dept.

McGruber writes: The CBS affiliate in Denver reports: "Two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers." According to law enforcement reports obtained during the CBS4 investigation, a male TSA screener told a female colleague in 2014 that he "gropes" male passengers who come through the screening area at DIA. "He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area." Although the TSA learned of the accusation on Nov. 18, 2014 via an anonymous tip from one of the agency's own employees, reports show that it would be nearly three months before anything was done."

You do realise you're just telling everyone you are massively insecure with your sexuality, right?

It has nothing to do with insecurity, I"m quite happy with my heterosexuality. And frankly I don't care what consenting adults do on their own behind closed doors.

But if a homosexual makes a pass at me or gropes me, I have no problem decking them. Sorry, but that's just the way it is. You can do what you want to do amongst yourselves, but leave me out of it. Period.

I would agree, EXCEPT that its the ones I'm least attracted to.. so it feels a little more like rape, than a frisk, which is certainly not fun. Upside, given how much they seem to be interested in my "package", I should just give them a washcloth so I can get some useful benefit out of the deal.

If we spin this as the TSA allowing for homosexual acts (especially on God-fearing straight folk!), could we use this to convince the GOP to support shutting it down? Toss in some terms like "limited government" if necessary.

Unfortunately, even if the gropers were french muslim abortion doctors with middle eastern ties and we spin it as a full infiltration, they wouldn't dare shut down their security theater. Just replace the actors from the middle down and parade it as a victory against terrorism.

The conservative base is actually very anti-TSA (or, at least, those active online are). It's such a clear sign of government overreach (literally, in this case), disrespect for the constitution, and so on. Heck, half this crowd thinks the right answer is just to issue all passengers guns. Not that the current GOP gives a shit what the voters want.

Issue all passengers knives. It just isn't very safe to fire a gun inside an airliner for any reason. Terrorists could just try to provoke a shooting match. But if every passenger had a knife, it would be very hard for a terrorist with a gun to do anything without getting mob stabbed.

There's "conservative" and then there are people who call themselves that while having an interest in the vast amount of money that moves about in the name of the TSA. Financial benefit or financial benefit for their donors, or a big welfare program (that pretends to be actual work) for their voters trumps any moral indignation. File it with prison rape to get some insight on how the seemingly intolerable can be ignored instead of some attempt made to deal with the problem.

Yes, that distinction is everything. I think America would benefit hugely from an actual conservative party - in fact, it may be the only thing that can save us from some serious problems we face. I don't know that I'd necessarily vote for such a party - maybe. But we'd be having the right debates, and issues like this and Net Neutrality might actually get some airtime on the actual issues and content of the law, instead of everything being about earmarks and favors owed.

If we spin this as the TSA allowing for homosexual acts (especially on God-fearing straight folk!), could we use this to convince the GOP to support shutting it down? Toss in some terms like "limited government" if necessary.

Sadly, no.

Cognitive dissonance is very powerful and this sounds like a textbook case of "no true scotsman".

He wasn't a TSA agent, the brave defenders of 'Murica because no true TSA agent would do such a thing.

In a true free-market system, American Airlines and Boeing would have been sued into the dirt after 9-11 for allowing their planes to be used as weapons

It sounds like you would like a world where the manufacturer of any tool that could be used as a weapon is liable for all such uses by criminals?

Enjoy your $200,000 automobile (mostly liability insurance for the manufacturer) with a top speed of 10 MPH and sensors all around that prevent it from hitting anything at any angle and that refuses to go into an a

All this TSA business was instituted primarily to make Michael Chertoff rich. And it worked marvelously.

The enhanced pat downs were instituted largely as a punishment for people opting out. This was necessary, since too many opt-outs would result in fewer purchases of the body scanners (which is where Chertoff makes his money).

There was a natural alliance between this and the enhanced intelligence gathering and tracking that the government wants to do on everyone anyway, so that just worked out as a side benefit.

Incidentally, the people who benefit most from this don't have to put up with it themselves, so it will require a hell of a lot of public outrage to ever get it shut down.

Actually you might want to read a news site sometime. (Comedy Central isn't actually news). GOP leaders, such as Republican senators, describe the TSA as "lost and bloated" and even "out of control". The (Democrat) Obama administration has been defending the TSA.

I think on this issue you'll find that high level GOP officials have an unusually wide stance and are willing to reach around the aisle, pointing fingers when necessary in order to come to a consensus. Many are even willing to bend over backwards to be more accommodating.

I'm not at all comfortable with the current screening procedure madness, but I'm far more comfortable when the TSA agent groping me is just as uncomfortable with the situation as I am. When they're taking pleasure in it, it's a good indication that the system has let us down.

with how mcdonalds and its franchisees promote from within, he must have been a pretty shitty employee to not have worked up to a store manager, or at least assistant manager, in 9 years.. he should be thankful they let him keep flipping burgers that long.

I wish - and I know this would never 'fly' - that we would make their lives as uncomfortable as ours - or even more so. they are really offended when their women are even looked at by westerners. what I would love to see is that we go OUT OF OUR WAY to fondle and embarass all the muslim women - ALL OF THEM - that enter or leave any western country. yes, its payback and its meant to inflict a return feeling for all that have 'done' for us.

WHAAA???!? This is modded "insightful"?

the fact that we let them ruin our way of life - and they got away with it - means that they are boldened to keep doing this crap to us.

What the heck? Who is doing this to whom? We are doing it to ourselves. Who does the TSA work for? Our government.

We did this to ourselves, and for nothing. Is there any evidence whatsoever that the TSA has prevented ANY terrorist attacks since it was instituted? NO.

There are countries that have experienced REAL terrorism. Places where random buses get blown up periodically, or random bombs go off in the downtown area of a city -- from a coordinated effort of terrorists. (See, for example, situations in Israel/Palestine, or England when the IRA was particularly active.)

We have NOTHING like that. If there were any significant number of Muslim terrorists out there just dying to "ruin our way of life," they could easily do so -- bomb some malls, bomb public transport, heck -- shoot up an area right outside the security zone at an airport. Remember after 9/11 when people were actually freaked out about such things? I remember people afraid to go to malls -- afraid that someone would put some chemicals or poison into the water supply, etc., etc.

How much of that happened? Nothing really. We just forgot about it. We didn't really make "security" around any of these things any better. Hell, we can't even keep our weapons-grade uranium safe [newyorker.com] with any real security.

We're doing nothing for any number of major terrorist targets, and the terrorists are doing nothing to attack them. Therefore, the only reasonable conclusion is there aren't a significant number of real terrorists. (Well, except for the retirees that the FBI entraps [esquire.com] by hanging out with them at Waffle House for months and convincing them they should attempt a terrorist act...)

So, given that it's clear we've done this whole TSA thing TO OURSELVES, why exactly is it that you want to lash out at Muslims everywhere, as if they were ALL represented by a handful of folks who plotted 9/11??

if we do a tit-for-tat (as childish as that might initially seem) then maybe the escalations and wars would come to a stand-still.

"Tit-for-tat" implies that there's some sort of actual targeting of people who did something. If a red-headed guy goes on a murder spree in a subway, and afterward the police start just randomly searching and beating the crap out of people on the subway to instill fear and dissuade anyone from attempting a similar act, your response is, "Let's go and starting beating the crap out of all redheads everywhere! That's tit-for-tat, and it will show them!"

(Don't get me wrong here -- I know the analogy is not exact, and there are militant Muslim extremist groups, whereas I don't know if there are militant redhead groups... but hopefully my point is clear. The ones doing the bad stuff at the TSA are our own fault, and saying we should use them to harass others because we allow them to harass us is one of the stupidest things I've seen modded up on Slashdot, and that's saying something....)

Seriously? What's more important than getting a "Score: 5, Funny"? It means you've made at least five people smile. Isn't giving others that joy more important than whatever code slogging you're doing instead?

Not that, but my wife once had an undergarment trigger the TSA sensors as an "anomaly" and had to be subjected to the full pat down routine. By a female employee who, I hope, wasn't just doing this because she found my wife attractive. This likely wouldn't let a male TSA agent pat down a female in the line as I believe they have rules in place that only the same-sex individual must do the pat down. Then again, this IS the TSA we're talking about, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was abused as well. They have been caught sending attractive females through the "naked scanner" and ogling the resulting images.

I'm not so sure about that... I opted out of the millimeter scan once, only to have the agent performing the pat-down tell me "next time you should ask for a female agent to pat you down"... I replied that I wanted him to be as uncomfortable as I was... reflecting on that moment, I'm no longer sure that was a witty thing to say.

You gotta love the cognitive dissonance. We are perfectly 'okay' (societally) with same gender patdowns because you know that can't be 'sexual' or exploitative, yet we no longer consider homosexuality to be deviant behavior to the point we largely support marriage equality.

My take on its government should not be allowed to have it both ways. You either don't believe in homosexuality as a normal state, or you can't support TSA patdowns. Sexual assault is sexual assault no matter what gender or sex the other persona happens to be unless its invited. And the TSA procedure meets every definition for assault. Do you feel free to turn around and leave if you are selected for an enhanced search? I don't I'd be considerably afraid that if I they suggested they needed to do a patdown and I responded "no thanks I'll just head back to my car" that I would find myself detained shortly their after.

I know this is a joke but I was recently reading the wikipedia article about Eunuchs and pretty much at every point in history we have had jobs that we've considered castration as a de facto requirement - harem manager, treble singer, etc.

The software doesn't know by itself which gender it is scanning, so someone has to enter either male or female? What if an on-process trans-gender is walking though, what would happen? Doesn't sound like a good system in general...

“He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area.”

If I am hired to set up a security checkpoint in front of a bar, I could do security pat downs without it being sexual. If, on the other hand, I intentionally manipulated the system to pat down attractive bar patrons for my own gratification, I'm pretty sure I would be arrested and end up on some sort of sex offender list.

Nobody wronged the TSA, so the TSA can't call the police. They didn't even witness the crime, they only heard about it afterwards. What needs to happen is for the thousands of men who were sexually assaulted need to bring up criminal charges against the TSA employees and civil charges against the TSA for allowing, enabling and encouraging the sexual assault.

Nothing about this group of idiots surprises me. Typical federal government cluster-fuck.

So now that the ball gropers have been let go (3 months later, but probably pretty fast by Fed standards) I would presume that the "gropees" are lining up the lawsuits. This is going to be hilarious. Watch how the surveillance tapes and emails disappear when asked to produce them.

We've seen a number of stories involving TSA agents being arrested for any number of crimes. Everything from assault, to child pornography, to murder. This shouldn't be a surprise at all. Which is not to say that all TSA agents ARE the scum that they tend to be made out to be. But it's a worrying program.

In terms of this kind of activities detailed in this story... well hell. I know from talking with a former TSA employee that this sort of thing is VERY common. I've even meet a former TSA agent that not only admits doing this at an airport in California. But he did it aallll the time. And he wasn't the only one doing it.

Well... are the number of murdering TSA agents greater than other professions? However, in this particular case, why aren't the two of them arrested and charged for the sexual assaults? For this, let the courts decide, not the DA. So what if the victim cannot be identified? Convenient that the person who was assaulted wasn't asked for their information. As for "nobody else has complained", the remaining people would have the understanding that this is _supposed_ to be happening. They were theoretically following the lawful commands of the TSA agent. Since it turns out that they were not lawful, then the agent should be arrested for the sexual assault as well as whatever statute covers the agent in exceeding their authority. "Held accountable". Hah. Merely firing them is insufficient.

This is probably more common than people realize. I was groped by a TSA screener at EWR a few months ago.

I usually get TSA Pre and don't have to go through the nude-o-scope, but occasionally when TSA Pre does not work - I opt out of the machine and choose the "pat down". Usually it's a fairly benign experience - screeners make a point to say that they will "stop just short of the private areas" and "use the back of their hand", and normally do so. I go through a dozen of these a year and it's normally a non

... and I even considered complaining - but I was running short on time...

You are under pressure. Running out of time. In danger of missing your flight and blowing up the subsequent schedule... in another words: you hold the short end of the stick. It obviously works as designed.

... back sweat. I'm not kidding. I travel frequently out of DIA. I wear a backpack over a light jacket, and the middle of my back (right between my shoulder blades) always gets identified as a pat-down area for investigation. My shirt is inevitably damp in that area. The nice TSA people gently rub my back as I wait for my bag to roll out of the X-ray machine. If it wasn't such a stupid process in its entirety, I might think it was actually kind of nice... like a spa or something, only with blue rubber glove

From the NSA to the TSA, it appears the tin-foil-hat-wearing nutjobs were right all along. What's next? Contrails really do contain mind-controlling chemicals? The moon landing really was...PUNCH TO FACE...nevermind...

When people are randomly selected for groping it's ok, but when someone is actually choosing who gets groped it's not ok and that person needs to be fired? What if the groping was equal to standard gropings? Could we use a pseudorandom number generator for extra screening or must it be truly random?

Someone should teach these guys it's not the selection process that makes it sexual assault.

Because, in the unlikely event of another terrorist attack on a plane, any politicians voted to eliminate the TSA will be blamed. Modern politicians spend all this time and effort trying to get elected, then they're too scared to do anything where they can't pass the buck.

It is a much different world after 9/11 for Americans, especially with flying. There were hijackings and all before, but nothing like 9/11. I could believe in the 1990's someone would still be complaining about rather light security.

Today, you are lucky to just be asked a few questions, and whatever you are faced with, you shut up and deal with it or you have somebody in a room groping your genitals.

Flying in America was awesome back in the 1990s. In 1998, I flew to my honeymoon without ID (left it in the car) and we were able to catch an earlier flight at the overlay point. I was even allowed to go back on the first plane to find my ticket voucher which had dropped between the seats. And they asked two basic questions (Did you pack your bags? Did you accept items from strangers?).

Somewhere in the 1990s I went to visit my parents with my sister and I had an earlier return flight, but my sister ended up needing to get back home earlier. We switched tickets. The airline had no issue whatsoever.